I think the intent is to demonstrate that the user owns a legal copy - and that intent is to clear their obligations - not the legal obligations of someone seeking to get around that. Of course it can be circumvented. So, technically - that's correct - it doesn't make YOU legally compliant, but it unbinds FAF from you in the legal sense by discharging their responsibility.

Rather than blaming the factory for the issue - you might wish to simply consider the scaling of naval units. There is a LOT of room to decrease the size, especially of the largest units - and I can say, having done this years ago in LOUD, ships rarely have issues leaving the yard now.

There are several moving parts at work here.

First off, the GC is not on the Land layer, it's still technically on the seabed - and you don't have Water Vision, so to you, it's not visible. If you had WaterVision, in your blueprint, you'd be able to see him. Even though the GC is underwater, it still has normal Vision, so it can see you.

Second, your weapons are not likely allowed to hit units that are on the seabed AND below water. Whereas the GC's Eye beam weapon is allowed to fire when it's above the water level at targets that are above the water. This particular situation, might be improved by insuring that the bone, on the GC, that is above the water, is listed as one of it's 'Target Bones', as found in it's blueprint. In this way, your weapons would have a bone, that they can target, when it gets above the waves.

@Deribus Not sure - we've had the d3d_windowscursor command in-line at LOUD for more than a week now, but a couple of days ago, we had some new users showing up that continued to have the problem - using the absolutely latest drivers. The task manager services did the trick, which was good for the users - but the services restart themselves, and not too many users are comfortable with altering core services.

I sincerely hope that this problem gets a proper NVidia resolution, sooner than later, as it's driving people off of FA entirely, especially new users that already have to deal with surround sound issues.

We addressed this issue several years ago in LOUD - it was a rather simple fix - and it hasn't made the HARMS, or other T3 torpedo defense units, awesome or unkillable. What it has done is properly framed the submarine, torpedo and anti-torpedo units in a way that makes them viable, and a meaningful portion of the naval game. If you don't properly compose your fleets with the appropriate units, you should expect to be defeated.

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

@vanifica said in Questions about performance:

I would be totally into this. I guess I assumed LOUD worked by graphical changes, but I never tested it extensively since it didn't have an online client as far as I could tell.

They claim 5000 units without any simspeed issues IIRC. That does imply there's some "magic bullet" somewhere in the code they figured out?

This has long been a myth - LOUD never gained any real performance boost from suppression of graphics. We did toy with this several years ago, and it stuck for some reason. There are certainly some graphical things we simplified or tied to the SIM speed, but over time, most of the pretty was returned to normal.

As Jip rightly points out - there was never a 'magic bullet' - just a lot of patient work going thru almost the entire code base, implementing the techniques that Jip is encouraging FAF to adopt now. The gains are real, but the work is extensive, but not difficult.

@deribus said in Stronger ASF:

This is the approach LOUD takes.

That's not true - ASF stats are essentially identical except in their relative cost/firepower relationship to other units.

Map size has little to do with it - the real issue draws in two aspects - unit count (which is directly responsible for the SIM slowing down) and traffic issues (unit collisions).

While a smaller map does reduce the memory requirement a bit, it has no impact beyond that. Unit count (and the complexity of those units) has long been recognized as the largest influence on performance, and memory consumption - and this 'unresponsiveness' that you're seeing is related to that.

It can impact players at different times, as it's really a measure of CPU 'saturation' - and if the problem is severe enough, it can impact multiplayer games for all players.

Unit collisions play a very big role in this - so anytime you have a situation with a large number of those (like clumps of engineers all crowding around a factory), or traffic jams caused by really tight and complex terrain, you're going to see a very big upswing in CPU activity - which manifests as 'unresponsiveness'.

Currently 62.

@Nuggets FAF is not the entire Supcom world. While it is popular - the bulk of the audience are solo players who never touch the FAF environment. ModDB is an excellent repository - and one that generates a tremendous amount of traffic and visibility. All modders, with non FAF-specific mods, like this one, will reach a far broader audience there.

LOUD is much like FAF, but primarily aimed at players versus AI games, rather than PvP. Also, like FAF, it is it's own environment so it's a bit of a shift. You can find it at https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-alliance

Having made my usual pitch, I'll point out that the code used, to do this, is entirely portable to FAF - but you'll have to find someone to do that.

LOUD has an edit box that lets you enter any value you'd like.

@Szasz Map markers are still important for many things such as defensive points, expansion bases, etc. Some of the FAF AI take advantage of a method which makes pathfinding free of markers, using a zoning method - but that's where it stops.

Pathfinding is important, and the marker method is very effective - but - only if the map maker understands how the AI uses the markers, and places the markers with that knowledge. That's the missing part for most AI, as it's not a very interesting subject.

The placement of the many other marker types has a dramatic impact on the AI's gameplay, but again, it requires a thorough understanding of how the AI uses those, and the intelligence around how they are evaluated, that makes all the difference. It's a subject that also requires a real understanding of how the particular map plays - there simply is no universal rules that work for any large segment of maps out there.

Historically, map marking has been neglected, with many map authors either doing nothing but the bare minimum, which brought about the creation of the zone method as a way of getting around the sheer number of maps that were badly marked.

Historically, believe it or not, this has been an audio issue and is usually associated with the 'Surround Sound' issue. Your game log file will likely reveal that you have an XACT:SND error.

You hit the nail on the head - nukes have a targeting limit - and once targeted by a 'ready' anti-nuke, other anti-nukes will NOT fire at that missile. This is what keeps your anti-nukes from all firing at the first nuke to come in range.

If however, that anti-nuke should miss - or be unready to fire - while still targeted on the nuke - you get this result.

As I recall, going to Idle State will NOT break the target lock, leaving you vulnerable.

The use of mass, for veteran levels, is purely a FAF based change. It supplants the original kill based mechanic. The healing mult is likewise, a FAF-only change. In the original game, when a unit made a vet level, it would have it's HP set to a % of it's new HP max, based upon how damaged it was. In FAF, this gets replaced with a fixed % of healing, based upon the HP of the unit at the time it makes the level.

There was a mod, many years back, called Total Veterancy - that extended the concept pretty much along the lines described above. It was quite popular, balance issues aside.

The primary drawback of this method is performance. Unit buffs are very memory intensive - especially when considering stacking multiple unique buffs, and even moreso when you consider that buffs are stored per unit - this adds up VERY quickly, not just for adding and removing the buffs, but the amount of memory consumed by each buff, for each unit, grows very quickly and will grow to a point where it will lead to memory cap crashes.

The mechanics for doing this work are pretty sound, but fairly code heavy.

BrewLAN

Splitting a single projectile - into multiple 'child' projectiles, is currently done in a couple of already existing weapons. The Cybran T2 Mobile Tactical Missile launcher unit, and the AEON T3/T4 Artillery Experimental.

You should look at how those scripts deal with creating new projectiles, based on the trajectory of the old one - while in flight.